System administrators may wish to migrate resources hosted at one location to another location in order to upgrade hardware, perform system maintenance, manage system resources, or perform load balancing. However, migrating some types of resources according to traditional approaches may cause significant disruption to computing operations.
Software containers may provide safe, consistent, controlled, and/or lightweight operating environments by providing resource and/or namespace isolation for applications that run within the containers. Software containers may facilitate flexible deployment for applications—for example, a software container may be taken down on one system, and an equivalent software container may be deployed on another system. However, redeploying software container while an application executes within the software container may disrupt the statefulness of the application, potentially leading to data loss, interoperational errors with outside systems, and/or dropping sessions with client systems (potentially including sessions involving end users). Thus, the decision of whether to migrate a software container using traditional approaches may entail a costly choice between the benefits of migration and the benefits of application reliability.
The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods for performing live migrations of software containers.